[Sigcr-l] Reading about how culture/language affects knowledge representation

Sun Sep 20 21:03:03 EDT 2009

An area where there does seem to be a literature on culture in relation to KO is DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).

I googled: How does culture affect classification?

An item of interest on the first page led to a books.google.com page of a book chapter of
Culture And Psychiatric Diagnosis: A Dsm-iv Perspective By Juan E. Mezzich

Chapter 12
Culture and the Diagnosis of Substance-Related Disorders

Joseph Westermeyer, M.D., Ph.D.

I then did the PubMed search
culture[majr] AND cl[sh]

and the first item was:
Issues for DSM-V: the role of culture in psychiatric diagnosis.
Alarcón RD, Becker AE, Lewis-Fernández R, Like RC, Desai P, Foulks E, Gonzales J, Hansen H, Kopelowicz A, Lu FG, Oquendo MA, Primm A; Cultural Psychiatry Committee of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry.
J Nerv Ment Dis. 2009 Aug;197(8):559-660. No abstract available. 
PMID: 19684490 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
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If you select it and click on the Lippincott Williams & Wilkins list, you’ll get the PDF (it’s an editorial).  The last sentence is:
A central role for sociocultural factors in
DSM-V will continue to build upon the promising historical trend
that began with DSM-IV, and will render the newly revised manual
a better instrument for understanding human distress and suffering
and for guiding culturally responsive, effective, and equitable care.

Whether the emphasis how to apply it and not enough on the actual classification, I don't know.  I assume the original question was on actual KO, not how to apply the KO, but maybe in the case of DSM, the classification and how to apply it for diagnosis are interwoven in the DSM.  Probably one has to look at the actual DSM to ascertain to what extent culture is relevant to KO in the manual rather than relevant to applying the KO, which may not be what the questioner is after.

Nevertheless, I imagine the DSM has evolved over the years in what constitutes a mental illness, and this probably has been affected by cultural changes.

Based on another paper, DSM-IV has a cultural formulation.  Here’s a paragraph from
Use of an expanded version of the DSM-IV outline for cultural formulation on a cultural consultation service.
Kirmayer LJ, Thombs BD, Jurcik T, Jarvis GE, Guzder J.
Psychiatr Serv. 2008 Jun;59(6):683-6.
PMID: 18511590 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Related Articles Free article at journal site

retrieved from search
cultulre[majr] AND diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders[majr]
Two 5-point Likert items inquired about familiarity with the DSM-IV Outline for Cultural Formulation before working with the CCS and perceived usefulness of the cultural formulation (scores range from 0, not at all, to 4, extremely). Closed questions asked about use of the cultural formulation to organize clinical data or to write up the case, and open-ended questions asked about useful or not useful aspects of the cultural formulation and suggestions for its refinement. Mann-Whitney U and chi square tests were used for comparisons on Likert and dichotomous variables, respectively. 

I also did PubMed search:
culture[majr] AND vocabulary, controlled[majr] resulting in 28 citations.  Many of them are on DSM because DSM is treed under Vocabulary, Controlled in MeSH, and searching exploded automatically.

28: 
International surveys on the use of ICD-10 and related diagnostic systems.
Mezzich JE.
Psychopathology. 2002 Mar-Jun;35(2-3):72-5.
PMID: 12145487 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
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Note that the author is probably the same as the one from the book from google search at beginning of this message.

There’s a wiki on him http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Mezzich.  He’s at Mount Sinai School of Medicine NYU and President of World Psychiatric Association.

I searched Westermeyer j AND culture[mh] (Westermeyer has more than 200 articles that seem to emphasize cultural psychiatry).  One of the abstracts
Clinical relevance of contemporary cultural psychiatry.
Alarcón RD, Westermeyer J, Foulks EF, Ruiz P.
J Nerv Ment Dis. 1999 Aug;187(8):465-71. Review.
PMID: 10463063 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
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contains the following sentence:

Cultural psychiatry adds significantly to the comprehensiveness of psychiatric evaluation and management and addresses prominent issues regarding understanding, classification, diagnosis, and competent treatment of most psychiatric disorders in every society and region of the world.

Note it includes “classification” as separate from “diagnosis.”
Westermeyer is at Univ. of Minnesota www.psychiatry.umn.edu/faculty/westermeyer/home.html

So if someone is interested in this specific domain, there seems to be stuff on it.

Something that came to mind immediately was from the Sapir Whorf hypothesis, which is more about how culture affects language, but I recall the example of Eskimos having 17 (or more) classifications for snow.  There's a paper at http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/cultural/language/whorf.html
A wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

I googled
Whorf "knowledge organization"

and another google books item came up
Language, mind, and culture: a practical introduction

and one of the things to be covered by the book is:
knowledge organization: frame semantics and cultural issues

There seem to be some relevant things resulting from that search at http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/docs/antidev.php
(a conference paper titled, "Anti-Development Biases in Thesaurus Design")
I looked for "cultur" which appeared under the headers
Bias 2: Low-Context Bias Associated with Western Science
Bias 6: Avoidance of Top-of-Hierarchy issues

so one might examine the results of that google search for others.

Susanne Humphrey

--- On Sat, 9/19/09, Dagobert Soergel <dsoergel at umd.edu> wrote:

From: Dagobert Soergel <dsoergel at umd.edu>
Subject: [Sigcr-l] Reading about how culture/language affects knowledge representation
To: sigcr-l at asis.org, isko-l at lists.gseis.ucla.edu
Date: Saturday, September 19, 2009, 12:33 PM

A beginning student asked me

Could you recommend a reading about how culture/language affects 
knowledge representation?

Does anyone know of the one or two articles that introduce this 
problem, or a bibliography?  A good treatment of cultural focus (or 
bias) in classifications, such as DDC or the Colon Classification, 
would certainly fit in here.

Dagobert

Dagobert Soergel
College of Information Studies
University of Maryland
4105 Hornbake Library
College Park, MD 20742-4345
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